Freelance Writing: Simple Tips on Complicated Topics10 Not Obvious Reasons Why Freelance Writing Can Be Addictive

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Freelance writing usually starts innocently enough. You think it’s only a job, like thousands of other jobs out there, until it starts to steal most of your awake time. It’s really cool to be passionate about what you’re doing. But are you sure that nothing went wrong and you aren’t becoming obsessed with writing?

Freelance Writing Addiction: Main Symptoms

Freelance writing can be addictive. Accept the fact that you are addicted, if you have any of the following symptoms:

• You spend more than 10 hours a day staring at a glowing screen.
• You check your writer’s profiles more often than your Facebook account and personal mail.
• You don’t feel safe if you’re not online for a while – what if a customer or a support representative dropped a message?
• Your laptop is on and next to you, even when it’s not really necessary – when you speak on the phone for instance, cook or eat.
• You are at a loss whenever you have a free evening – what are you supposed to do if not sweat over some writing gigs?

10 Not Obvious Reasons

Why is freelance writing potentially addictive?

1. You work from home and blur the lines between your personal life and professional duties.
2. You get accustomed to spending evenings writing, sacrificing most of other pastimes.
3. You spend too much time online and shift a big part of your life into virtual reality.
4. You work in the comfortable atmosphere of your home and start to ignore the natural demands of your organism to have some reasonable schedule.
5. Your salary and well-being depend on your activities online and you start a cult of the glowing screen.
6. The harsh writing policies can lead you to develop the perfectionism syndrome, which, in turn, can make you spend hours on researching or proofreading.
7. A few encounters with ‘don’t know what I want’ or ‘I’m not sure what exactly but I feel that something is wrong here’ customers can make you always expect revision requests.
8. You are proud of your returned clients and don’t want to lose them, so you wait for their urgent requests all the time.
9. Going through the ‘concentration nightmare’ at the starting point of your freelance career, you asked everyone to leave you alone. They still do.
10. You don’t have fixed working hours and tend to work late at night, ruining your health and biorhythm.

Tips to Kick Harmful Habits

• Get an offline hobby – yeah, there’s life beyond your glowing screen.
• Never neglect your family, home and friends because of writing.
• Establish a routine – only because you work from home doesn’t mean you have to work round-the-clock.
• Learn to say no.

Are you addicted to freelance writing?